Michele Scalza’s wager about the Cadgers

Michele Scalza’s wager about the Cadgers is a comic contest in which a young Florentine turns a debate about family rank into a demonstration of how confidently absurd reasoning can win an audience. Asked to prove that professional beggars are the oldest and noblest gentlemen, he makes their mocked appearance the foundation of a mock genealogy: they must have been fashioned by God while He was still learning to draw. His victory depends not on evidence in any ordinary sense, but on the company’s willingness to recognize and reward the joke.

Setting and Occasion

The episode belongs to the Sixth Day’s exchange of witty replies. After Pamfilo’s retort to Forese da Rabatta had prompted laughter, Fiammetta takes up a remark Pamfilo had made about the Cadgers of Florence. She presents Scalza’s story as remaining within the day’s theme and as a comic proof of their nobility. The anecdote thus grows out of the company’s own conversation: a reference to the Cadgers becomes the occasion for a wager, and the wager turns a passing joke into a staged argument.

Scalza is introduced as a young man renowned for being merry and agreeable, with a store of unusual stories. The young Florentines enjoy his company when they go out together. One day, while he is among a group at Monte Ughi, they begin disputing which Florentine families are the oldest and best. The Uberti and Lamberti are named, along with other houses as they occur to the speakers. Scalza laughs at the contest and redirects it toward the Cadgers, the beggars who live near Santa Maria Maggiore. His claim is deliberately incongruous: he assigns the highest social distinction not to one of the families under discussion, but to people the company treats as an obvious target for ridicule.

The Challenge and the Wager

The young men assume Scalza is merely trying to gull them. He insists that he is speaking truth, then makes the joke answerable through a wager. The prize is supper for the winner and six companions of his choice. The contest also has an agreed judge: Piero di Fiorentino, in whose house the group gathers. Neri Mannini accepts Scalza’s challenge, and the others follow them to Piero, expecting the claim to collapse and the hearing to provide them with entertainment at Scalza’s expense.

Piero first hears Neri’s argument and then asks Scalza how he can prove his assertion. Scalza does not appeal to ancestry, wealth, or public standing. Instead he adopts a premise the young men had themselves just used: the older a person is, the nobler that person is. He then makes the entire wager turn on establishing that the Cadgers are older than everyone else. The argument’s comic force comes from how neatly its steps fit together while its central claim is transparently impossible. Scalza treats the company’s familiar way of ranking families as if it were a rigorous rule, then supplies an explanation designed to be laughable rather than credible.

A Mock Proof of Antiquity

Scalza’s proof is that God made the Cadgers when He first began to learn to draw, whereas the rest of humankind came later, after He had learned. Their supposed greater age follows from the story of creation; their nobility follows from the rule that age confers rank. In place of documentary evidence, he offers the Cadgers’ faces as visible confirmation. Other people, he says, have well-composed and proportioned features, while the Cadgers’ faces seem like the early exercises of a beginner.

He elaborates the caricature in specific detail: one face is too long and narrow, another too broad; one man’s nose is too long and another’s too short; some have a jutting, upturned chin and enormous jawbones like an ass’s, while some have uneven eyes, one larger or lower than the other. The list turns physical difference into the punchline and makes the argument’s supposed evidence increasingly vivid. Scalza claims these are the unbalanced forms children produce when they first begin to draw. The image of God learning to draw supplies both the explanation for the Cadgers’ appearance and the fanciful date that makes them the most ancient people.

Verdict and Comic Payoff

Piero, Neri, and the other listeners burst into laughter as Scalza completes his reasoning. They declare him right and award him the supper, accepting the conclusion that the Cadgers are the noblest and oldest gentlemen not only of Florence but of the world or the Maremma. Their verdict is the point of the performance: Scalza wins because his listeners understand the comic transformation of an insult into a pedigree, and because the wager has made them judges of the joke as well as of its ostensible proof.

The ending returns the anecdote to the exchange that prompted it. Fiammetta recalls Pamfilo’s earlier use of the Cadgers’ appearance as a measure of how ugly Forese da Rabatta would look among them. That callback links Scalza’s invented nobility to the company’s continuing play with appearance, rank, and verbal one-upmanship. His argument does not overturn social hierarchy outside the joke; it briefly makes the hierarchy itself available for ridicule, using the language of age and nobility to crown the very people convention would exclude.